1. Technical Field
This invention is directed towards a system and method for face recognition. More particularly, this invention relates to a system and method for face recognition using synthesized training images.
2. Background Art
Face recognition systems essentially operate by comparing some type of model image of a person's face (or representation thereof) to an image or representation of the person's face extracted from an input image. In the past these systems, especially those that attempt to recognize a person at various face poses, required a significant number of training images to train them to recognize a particular person's face. The general approach is to use a set of sample images of the subject's face at different poses to train a recognition classifier. Thus, numerous face images of varying poses of each person to be recognized must be captured and input for training such systems. This requirement for a significant set of sample images is often difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. Capturing sample images may be complicated by the lack of “controlled” capturing conditions, such as consistent lighting and the availability of the subject for generating the sample images. Capturing of numerous training images may be more practical in the cases of security applications or the like, where it is likely that the subject to be recognized is readily available to generate the training image set, but may prove impractical for various consumer applications.